by Norman Lewis
Hype in publishing may have existed before his time, but he brought it to a fine art. Deciding to put Katherin Mayo’s Mother India on the map, he sent an advance copy to every member of Parliament and sold 300,000 hardback copies. Sometimes he could be devious. Spotting Mary Webb’s Precious Bane as a potential winner, he first negotiated an advance on royalties of £100, then, having noted that the story was set in Shrewsbury where Stanley Baldwin had been brought up, engineered the PM’s ‘discovery’ of the book. Baldwin’s enthusiasm was reported back to Cape by his spies, as was also the PM’s intention to speak in praise of Precious Bane at a dinner for the Royal Literary Fund. Mary Webb’s four previous books had met with little success but it was clear to Cape at this juncture that they might now have a future, for he promptly approached the original publishers and was able to buy up the rights for small sums. In the first year of its publication Precious Bane had attracted little attention, having only earned two thirds of Jonathan’s hundred pounds. Then Baldwin, in one of his rare oratorical passages, called it a masterpiece, and it became a bestseller overnight, while the four previous near-flops shared enough of the limelight to become commercially viable. Fame and fortune for Mary came too late. Royalties were beginning to pile up to which she had no instant access and to which Cape refused anticipatory release. She remained short of cash and her appeals for loans were turned down. Jonathan refused to see her and his deputy Wren Howard put her off and got his face smacked. By this time her health was failing. She was reduced to keeping a flower stall on Shrewsbury market, and with her books selling by the thousands—as they continued to do for many years—she died in near poverty.
Among Jonathan Cape’s many literary associations had been the truly extraordinary and profitable one with T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia—with whom he had remained on intimate terms for a number of years. I had read Revolt in the Desert and as much as I could manage of Seven Pillars of Wisdom—books which had transformed the fortunes of the firm. Through my friend at Routledge I knew something, too, of Lawrence’s life while serving as Aircraftsman Shaw of the RAF for a daily pay of 2/7, at a time when he was negotiating deals of thousands of pounds for the publication of his books. By the time of the lunch at Bedford Square Lawrence had been dead for fourteen years yet I remembered only too well the headlines in the national press when it was announced that the manuscript of ‘the greatest work of literature since the Bible’ had been lost—left behind in the taxi carrying Aircraftsman Shaw to Bedford Square. Could this, I wondered, have been part of the greatest edifice of publicity ever erected in the history of publishing? Another version of the lost manuscript story was that it had been left in, of all places, the waiting room of Clapham Junction station. As soon as it was diplomatically possible to do so, I tackled Daniel George on this matter, and although he gave me no reply, I was left to interpret a secret smile.
Cape and Lawrence spent much time in each other’s company and there were certain areas of similarity in their characters. Both men had a taste for austerity. The leader of the Arabs (and personal friend of Winston Churchill) professed to enjoy life in an RAF barracks. Jonathan Cape travelled third class by train or slow steamer, lived largely on Irish stew, and although thrice married once spoke in my presence of being troubled by the carnality of sex. Lawrence pretended to enjoy poverty and, shortly before the publication of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, wrote asking Jonathan about the possibility of taking on reviewing jobs to help out his army income, which had increased to 3s. 9d. per day.
The book was bought by the whole nation, made the firm’s fortune and presumably Lawrence’s too, although no information was disclosed about this. It runs to 672 pages on excellent paper, is poetical and sometimes biblical in style, contains three photographs of the author and can still usually be found in the libraries of substantial houses. A suspicion remains that few readers soldiered on to the end of this recital of the minutiae of a military campaign in the desert. Borrowing a copy recently I found that, characteristically, many pages had been left uncut.
By this time, Michael Howard had reached a point in his book when he was exposed to the grinding labour of sifting through correspondence exchanged over the years with some of the most difficult of Cape’s authors, and was rapidly becoming sick and tired of them as a species. He was now thoroughly bogged down with Malcolm Lowry who, in spite of his exceptional gifts, had suffered from what Michael believed to be an extreme form of megalomania. All Lowry’s life and work, he said, was characterised by excess. Having a friend who knew Lowry well, I had to agree with this. Authors in this particular category were almost perpetually drunk, went in for wretched sexual affairs, spent years writing long and intricate masterpieces and, worst of all, innumerable letters.
Lowry published a single book with Cape, Under the Volcano, involving everyone engaged in its production with endless problems. Daniel George was given the nominally final manuscript in 1947 and worked on it off and on for two years before it could be sent to the printers. The book is roughly about booze and sex among American expatriates in a small Mexican town overlooked by a volcano, but suddenly the author pulls himself out of this simple and recognisable scene to go off on a sea journey described in huge and tedious detail.
It was Daniel’s job to excise this literary tumour from an otherwise moderately healthy body of work. It was left to the directors to face the ensuing wrath. His intervention produced a letter from Lowry running to sixteen thousand words of critical analysis, and I was shown the enormous bundle. It was one of the thirty-odd letters received from the author, several being more than five thousand words in length. Nevertheless, the firm stuck to its guns and the truncated version came out in 1950. It was a great book with a touch of surrealistic madness about it that I immensely enjoyed. William Plomer thought it might have been better for Lowry to stick to poetry, although I found the outbursts of mania part of the charm.
Michael said, ‘Lowry was only the most energetic of the correspondents. Look at these.’ He was about to start on the last letters of T. E. Lawrence, written shortly before his death. I picked up two of the letters and glanced at a few paragraphs. ‘If anybody needs money, it is surely myself, earning 3/9 a day with considerable effort and pain: but I would rather starve than earn another penny by any publication …’ ‘Thank you for sending the Liddell Hart book to the Air Ministry, and for not sending the bill. That kindness postpones my need of a translator by rather more than ten days. Actually I’ll be full of money in March for they gave me a gratuity of £12. I have an income of 25/- per week, clear, and hope to live comfortably on that, without work until at least 1935.’
‘Did you ever see him?’ I asked Michael.
‘Only once, when I was eleven. I went to see my father in his office, and he was there. He was very polite and serious, and talked to me as if I were grown up, and I liked that.’
In the mid-fifties business at 30 Bedford Square was on the upturn again after a temporary slump. The success of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels had contributed to this revival of fortunes, yet Jonathan Cape was disconcerted by the author.
Fleming had been virtually forced on the firm by his friend William Plomer, with whom he had worked during the war. While Plomer was a poet, it would be fair to say that there were few writers who had more completely escaped the touch of the muse than Fleming. Yet there is little doubt that he became the narrator of the improbable adventures of James Bond with some regret, for at the time when he first peered out wistfully over the threshold of the literary world he had actually tried to persuade Edith Sitwell to collaborate with him on a study of the Swiss philosopher Paracelsus.
At Bedford Square he was seen as a brash outsider, and was thoroughly disliked by everyone except William Plomer. Jonathan Cape read only a few chapters of Fleming’s first offering, Casino Royale, and none of his subsequent books, and would never meet the author. Wren Howard, Jonathan’s partner, customarily referred to him as ‘that bounder’. Michael Howard wrote: ‘the book itsel
f repelled me and caused me sleepless nights, for I thought that its cynical brutality, unrelieved by humour, revealed a sadistic fantasy that was deeply shocking, and that the book would do discredit to the list.’
I now knew Michael well enough for him to be able to express his doubts over the new acquisition. He was astounded but also troubled by Fleming’s extreme self-confidence, and by his determination to involve himself in every aspect of his book’s production. Although Jonathan Cape wished to have as few dealings with Fleming as possible, a remorseless and hair-splitting tussle went on—with Michael Howard acting as intermediary—when the contract for Casino Royale was drawn up. The spectacle of these two rich men scuffling together over trivial financial arrangements was engrossing if weird. Later in the contest, Fleming asked for sixteen free copies of his book rather than the six free copies an author customarily receives. In the end Jonathan was goaded into actually writing him a personal letter on the subject, in response to Fleming’s suggestion that the question of the extra copies might be dealt with by a toss of a coin, on the basis of double or quits. This, finally, Jonathan agreed to under pressure from his co-directors, and Fleming lost. In a further letter Jonathan referred to his regret that the situation had to be decided in this manner, which ‘goes entirely against my Quaker origins’.
The fact is that Jonathan Cape at all times avoided spending more than he had to. Those who worked in the conduct of his business were not overpaid. The celebrated reader Edward Garnett at first received £200 per annum, which was what a shop assistant might expect in those days, although lunch was thrown in. When I first met Daniel George, he was paid £400 but had to fork out for lunch. I certainly lost no face with Jonathan by asking for no advance against royalties at all, which for him may have been a unique experience.
My first meeting with Ian Fleming had been at the second of Jonathan Cape’s two annual Christmas parties, shortly after the publication of Casino Royale. We drifted into each other in a far corner of a half-empty room and Ian greeted me with one of his frequent slightly-enraged smiles. The second party, he told me, was reserved for Cape’s second-list authors, and I gathered that he saw this as another attempt to put him in his place. I assured him that it was an alphabetical arrangement, but with the efficiency that characterised all his endeavours, he had already checked on this possibility and pointed out two Bs and a C nobody had heard of wandering disconsolately among the sparse and unsuitable furniture in the room. Suddenly he pulled himself together and to my amazement told me he had just read Volcanoes, adding that he found it ‘quite poetical in parts’. Much flattered by this, I would have liked to reply in kind. His reference to his own work was deprecatory, but I said that I had heard nothing but praise for Casino Royale, and was much looking forward to reading it myself. The unacceptable truth was that I had already made a start on the book, but had given up after the first two chapters, for although I was by no means shocked by what Michael Howard described as brutality and cynicism, the sheer improbability of this opus broke my spirit and deterred me from soldiering on.
It was curious that, while so much absorbed by mundanities, Fleming should have had a respect for poetry. ‘Do you write poetry?’ he asked, and I replied with regret that I did not. Someone had told him that I lived in Bloomsbury, he said, and he wanted to know if any of the old literary coteries still existed. Once again I had to disappoint him. We talked about Eliot and Auden. I told him my favourite poet was Garda Lorca. He surprised me be asking if I had read him in the Spanish, and I said that I had. After further discussions on such topics he invited me to lunch at the White Tower next day, where in a somewhat more discreet environment than the Cape party he questioned me about my travels in Central America and in particular Cuba.
After the meal we moved on to his office at the Sunday Times where he was foreign manager. He had a proposition to put—would I go to Cuba, he asked. ‘To do what?’ I wanted to know. To find out all I could about the charismatic revolutionary called Castro who had established himself in the mountains of that island, and to investigate the chances of his success.
Fleming had been in Naval Intelligence throughout the war, and it was quite clear in the course of the conversation that followed that despite his current occupation with a newspaper his links with Intelligence had not been severed, although his efforts in that field were now concentrated upon the Caribbean. It was evident that he had been able to come by the full details of my highly undistinguished army career in Field Security at the bottom of the Intelligence pyramid. Fleming said he was unhappy with information reaching him from the island, not only through our Embassy and the Foreign Office but from his own contacts, naming one of them as Edward. Scott, a New Zealander, ex SOE and now editor of the English language Havana Post. He showed me Scott’s most recent report. This said that the Castro rebels were confined to a small redoubt in the Sierra Maestra mountains, from which they showed no signs of breaking out. They were under constant attack by the Cuban air force, and with the United States solidly behind the Cuban dictator Batista, the end could not be postponed much longer. Fleming said, ‘I simply don’t believe this.’
I now discovered that Ian was a fanatical admirer of Ernest Hemingway, who had chosen to settle in Havana. He told me that he had read all his books several times, and believed that he had come to absorb Hemingway’s distinctive style in such a way that he frequently wrote passages agreed among his friends to be indistinguishable from the work of the master. He was currently on his second book. Live and Let Die, containing, he thought, a number of instances that he called inspirational borrowings and he was looking forward to trying a few of these on me.
There was no reason why I should have attempted to challenge these comfortable self-delusions, but what was more disturbing at this moment was, in addition to Fleming’s worship of Hemingway as a writer, his view of him as the supreme man of action and a champion of democracy. Who would be more likely than the agents he employed to know what went on behind the scenes in the Cuban conflict, Fleming asked. A way therefore had to be found for me to see Hemingway, but although he had already written to him he had received no reply.
However, Jonathan Cape himself was able to come to the rescue, for the two men had remained on affectionate terms since Cape had published Hemingway’s first book. Cape still refused to see Fleming, so it was left to me to persuade him to write to Cuba and ask Hemingway to talk to me. This he agreed to do, and received a favourable reply. Jonathan’s personal interests entered into this, for this was at a time when the whole literary world awaited news of Hemingway’s latest book, which had been years in the writing. Of this, what was generally believed to be an excerpt, The Old Man and the Sea, had been published and acclaimed a masterpiece. The mission to Havana, then, was to be in pursuit of two separate goals, and during inevitable and lengthy delays caused by the necessity of arranging meetings with Fleming’s various contacts in Cuba, I got to know the man a little better.
Above all I found Ian to be remarkably organised in every aspect of his personality and life, with the possible exception of his marriage. He was able to bulldoze Cape into letting him supervise the production of his own books, and to plan their production over the years. While doing his best to keep Ian at arm’s length, Jonathan had contributed his unique skills in the matter of their promotion. Ian clubbed, dined and played cards with the newspaper proprietors, and Jonathan had the top reviewers under control. Thus the foundations of what is now called ‘hype’ were laid.
Many people, apart from his publishers, disliked Fleming, although I got on well enough with him, albeit while perceiving inexplicable weaknesses in the smooth façade. He seemed to have little regard for women apart from in their sexual role, and told me that he had only written Casino Royale ‘to make me forget the horrors of [his recent] marriage’. I noticed that in the presence of women his conversation tended to be salacious, whereas at other times it was not. On three occasions when reference to some well-known person had been made, he
had said, ‘He is afraid of me.’ The remark would be accompanied by a smile of quiet satisfaction, although I could not understand why it should please him to be feared. In our personal transactions I found him genial, expansive and considerate, and he was without a trace of pomposity. He had a lively, schoolboy interest in almost every subject, and was constantly ringing up friends he assumed to possess some specialised knowledge he could use in his books. I had once owned an old racing car and could tell him what it was like to race at Brooklands. Other friends might be asked the muzzle velocity of a .25 bullet fired from a Beretta automatic, or details of an Amazonian butterfly reported to impart a painful sting.
Despite our publisher’s bad publicity, I had no objection to Ian Fleming as a person, and I agreed with his own view of himself as a writer: that he was mediocre. There was nothing I read in his books I could believe, and the more books he wrote the more an excessive fantasy took over. But the suggested mission to Cuba I found irresistible, partly because of my ardent admiration of the island, and also for the promise of an adventure I could never have brought myself to reject.
It was a Sunday in late December 1957 when I arrived in Havana. I was carrying several letters of introduction, including one to Edward Scott, who lived in the Sevilla Biltmore Hotel—rather splendidly, Ian told me—in the penthouse flat. Ian had asked him to reserve a room for me, which had been done, but there was a note from Scott saying that he had been called away to Pinar Del Rio and might be held up there for two or three days. I unpacked, took a quick bath, then decided on a short tour of the neighbourhood.
The Sevilla Biltmore was on the Prado, Havana’s principal street, which even now at half-past eight in the morning was hugely active with strolling, loudly chattering crowds, and men smoking tremendous cigars. Among these were many American tourists, some of them behaving in an erratic fashion, and I was told by the man at the kiosk from whom I bought the morning edition of Scott’s newspaper that most of them were drunk and would normally remain in this state over the whole of their weekend in Havana. It was a situation confirmed by the existence of a number of bars advertising in English ‘Hangover Breakfasts’.